D&D General Rethinking alignment yet again

[Celebrim]

Just..............................let go. It can't kill you if you stop touching it.

But then he wouldn't get the foozle!

Believe me I've seen the sort of players that do walk into orphanages and slaughter all the innocents get outraged that the Book of Virtue blasts them when they open it. I've seen so much Cake Eating around the alignment system where the player plays a ruthless murder hobo with nothing but self-interest and then when it's in his self-interest to have a Good alignment, claims he's Good because he's the hero. It took me 25 years to come up with an effective non-confrontational counter to the Chaotic Evil Cake Eaters that wanted to have everything their way with no consequences.

 

[RuinousPowers]

Alignment has never constrained a PC. You've always been able to act outside of your alignment. The big useful part of alignment for players is that it's just there to guide your roleplay. That's it. It's not a straightjacket and never has been.

Not much of a roleplaying guide if everyone has their own definition, and no one actually has to follow it.

But that's all besides the point, as there are consequences to alignment, which are described as "whatever the DM says they are".

 

[Celebrim]

Each of them can be considered "objective" (though I'm not sure any of them can be considered "truths"), in a way that can be considered "universal", and thus fit with the idea of a cosmological alignment system.

That is an excellent way to put it.

 

[RuinousPowers]

Oh, please. If we abolished alignment right this moment, the plurality of GMs would still be mortified if one of my characters espouses the merits of chattel slavery, or endorses sacrificing a baby to the Dark Gods™. I am a connoisseur of evil clerics, and removing the "evil" label that gets glued to them won't stop other people at the table from making frowny faces when they get up to their shenanigans.

If removing alignment changes nothing,

I'm not sure what you are trying to state. What do you think is a moral dilemma? If acting against the character's defined nature as a result of a moral dilemma isn't a moral dilemma then neither is acting with the character's defined nature. The only alternative to that would be trinary logic with no defined nature, but in practice what I find from no defined nature is that there definitely then is no moral dilemma as the nature will be defined at the moment as what is convenient and then redefined conveniently at the next test. At least if there is a buoy marking the waters, the player is forced to consider they are bobbing back and forth to either side of it.

Let me give a concrete example of a moral dilemma. You have the trolley problem, with 5 strangers bound to one track and your fiance bound to the other. Does this problem change in difficulty if you have an alignment system? For like 5 of the 9 alignments, this isn't really a hard dilemma in theory. Chaotic evil or neutral obviously saves your fiance. Only four have a difficult choice because they have competing moral guidelines or competing self interest. But because both choices are evil, it probable that neither of those four alignments thank that either answer wrong or right. You can come up with Lawful Good answer for both based on duty. And yes, lawful systems generally define this as a hierarchy of personal duty. The answer they give will be different if your liege, child, or spouse is on one side or the other.

You know who has the biggest moral dilemma though? Suppose you have a lawful neutral character that knows his duty is to sacrifice his self-interest and save the many over the few. It's entirely possible that RP could cause him to pull a Javert here and forgo his duty and that would be interesting.

But my guess is that if you never made the player choose then this not a hard choice for a player and you'll never have a moral dilemma.

However that doesn't even touch on whether presenting a trolley problem deliberately in play is good DMing. If it comes up fine, but what is the motivation in deliberately creating "you can't win scenarios"?

No, the Trolley Problem isn't good in play, yet whenever paladins show up it seems DMs make it their personal goal to trip them up.

 

[Maxperson]

Not much of a roleplaying guide if everyone has their own definition, and no one actually has to follow it.

A roleplaying guide isn't a guide if it forces you into anything. So alignment is a fantastic guide, in that it......................guides you. It gives you advice.

But that's all besides the point, as there are consequences to alignment, which are described as "whatever the DM says they are".

So there's this thing called the social contract. If a DM is an arse and just does whatever he wants and abuses that power, he loses his players over it. The DM has the authority to change any rule. Abusing that authority is bad faith DMing. There needs to be a good reason to change something and if a DM wants alignment to have teeth, he has to change it before the campaign begins and let the players know in case they want to find a different game. If they stay with his game after he has changed the alignment rules and informed them, then they have accepted those teeth and have no right to complain about it.

 

[Warpiglet-7]

In ye olde days, there was drift. One thing did not generally cause a change in and of itself save something extreme.

Alignment led to one major debate in our group over decades. Of course it was related to a lawful good Paladin and the harlot table.

One.

On the flip side we talked about evil and good. There are some fairly recognizable sign posts and a lot are cross cultural.

A discussion and DM definitions are enough. I won’t get into the chaotic neutral stuff beyond saying people play them too narrowly.

To each their own. For our group alignment was fine. That it interfaces with holy avengers, evil books and magic candles tripped up no one.

I can see how people they relish pushing limits and engaging in debates could make it a miserable slog.

 

[RuinousPowers]

A roleplaying guide isn't a guide if it forces you into anything. So alignment is a fantastic guide, in that it......................guides you. It gives you advice.

So there's this thing called the social contract. If a DM is an arse and just does whatever he wants and abuses that power, he loses his players over it. The DM has the authority to change any rule. Abusing that authority is bad faith DMing. There needs to be a good reason to change something and if a DM wants alignment to have teeth, he has to change it before the campaign begins and let the players know in case they want to find a different game. If they stay with his game after he has changed the alignment rules and informed them, then they have accepted those teeth and have no right to complain about it.

And just like level limits, it's the DM who is enforcing it, not the rules. So your statement of "Alignment had teeth in 1e" is only true if the DM chose to enforce it. Otherwise 1e and 5e can handle alignment exactly the same way.

 

[Celebrim]

No, the Trolley Problem isn't good in play, yet whenever paladins show up it seems DMs make it their personal goal to trip them up.

Then you have a "The DM is Satan" problem and you have a more fundamental problem than the Alignment system. Which since this is coming up in multiple threads I should probably write an essay on it at some point.

If you are dealing with a DM that is metagaming against the players and is trying to put them in no win situations, usually the best move is just play evil characters because if the universe you live in is heavily biased to evil and the supreme power of that world is in fact diabolical and perverse, then you really can't fight the system - especially not openly by declaring you are a Paladin or something.

 

[CreamCloud0]

It took me 25 years to come up with an effective non-confrontational counter to the Chaotic Evil Cake Eaters that wanted to have everything their way with no consequences.

May we ask what the solution that you ended up with was?

 

[Maxperson]

And just like level limits, it's the DM who is enforcing it, not the rules. So your statement of "Alignment had teeth in 1e" is only true if the DM chose to enforce it. Otherwise 1e and 5e can handle alignment exactly the same way.

Back during 1e, the groups I played in decided against level limits And yes, if a group or DM opted not to enforce 1e's teeth, they didn't exist for that game. My point, though, is that 1e's RAW had alignment teeth where 5e's RAW does not. There hasn't been RAW alignment teeth for at least 14 years.